Olympic TV vs. Streaming Audiences

Now that the Rio Olympics have come to a close, there has been a lot of analysis on the ratings from this year's NBC broadcast. Most interestingly, there has been a lot of discussion around the low TV audience vs. the record breaking streaming audience. According to sources, the amount of nightly primetime viewers for the 2016 Rio Games averaged about 25.4 million viewers (the lowest since the 2004 Games). NBC's online stream of the games scored big though, amounting to about 3.3 billion minutes and 100 million unique users (about a 29% increase from the 2012 Games). According to the LA Times, "When NBC executives return from Rio, their first job will likely be analyzing how much streaming cannibalized the traditional TV audience." Read more about why here.